Secret Language (33 page)

DS:
One of the reasons I’m curious about your family has to do with what your novel seems to say about families, about how we are shaped—irrevocably—by who we come from. This seems as much an issue of nurture as nature, since Isadora has inherited so many traits from the father she never knew, and since both Faith and Connie have been damaged by their parents and saved—to a degree—by their childhood coping mechanisms which continue into adulthood.

MW:
The central notion in
Secret Language
is that we’re shaped more by shared experience than by blood. Isadora’s never going to fit in the way she wants to, because she didn’t share a childhood with Faith and Connie. They’re going to take her in, but that’s not the same as absorbing her into their experience. Not surprisingly, sibling dynamics have always fascinated me. For example, I love my older brother, but because he joined the air force the year I was born, I have a different relationship with him than with my sister Cathe, with whom I shared a bed for eighteen years. Because I never lived with my brother, he was always more of an uncle figure than a brother figure. He has children my age. On the other hand, because my brother and I are the musicians in the family, we share something unique.

DS:
You strike me—you’ll excuse me for being personal—as a very loving person.

MW:
Oh, thank you.

DS:
And yet your novel is about people who need to learn how to love, who can’t quite articulate either their needs or their affections. I wondered where that came from, the interest in that subject.

MW:
As I look at my work over time, I realize that a recurring theme for me is of replacing things that have been lost. People assemble families out of scraps sometimes, since everybody needs some kind of family. For some people, family is the family they were born into and never manage to shake. For others, it is a family that they later assemble. Or a work environment that is somewhat circumscribed.

DS:
Connie creates a family with Stewart.

MW:
And Isadora, who is trying to collect on something she thinks she missed out on. Life is a series of losses for everybody, and we just keep filling up holes as we get older. Some people have to start at a very early age.

DS:
I happened to read your second novel,
My Only Story
, before I read your first novel,
Secret Language
. They’re very different books, though I’m struck by one rather profound similarity. In both books, there is a woman who is an observer of a very connected, noisy family. In the case of
My Only Story
, it’s Rita, the hairdresser/narrator who wants very much to claim the Dohertys as her own. In
Secret Language
, Faith marries into a family very much like the Dohertys, and yet she’s overwhelmed by them. It all makes me think of the famous Tolstoy quote about how happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own special way. Do you agree with Tolstoy?

MW:
Oh, no. I think happy families are happy in infinitely varied ways and that happy families are not happy all the time. Although I wouldn’t want to write a novel in which a happy family takes center stage, I love them as a counterpoint or backdrop to the main character’s struggle. A happy family can feel burdensome if you’re not happy yourself. No matter who you are, you think of the world at some point in terms of insiders and outsiders, and people rarely cast themselves as insiders. Feeling like an outsider is a common human theme, and in my novels, it seems to show up in the guise of a big family that’s hard to penetrate.

DS:
I wonder if you could say something about your title. It refers, of course, to the secret language that Stewart mentions on
this page
, the supposed secret language that indicates the special understanding of siblings. It seems to me that many people in your book speak a secret language. Connie and Faith. Connie and Stewart. Even Billy and Delle, to a degree.

MW:
My original title for this book was
Muscle Memory
. My editor said, “You can’t call this book
Muscle Memory
. It’s just stupid.” But I actually think the original title describes some aspects of the novel more precisely than
Secret Language
. When you do something often enough for long enough, your muscle retains the motion. Emotionally, that’s what Faith is up against; she’s been closed off for so long it’s almost impossible for her to exist any other way. But
Secret Language
is a decent title, too, because the notion of a secret language filters down to all the characters in one way or another. Joe and Faith have their married way of speaking long after the divorce; Connie and Stewart have the banter of exhausted singles on the prowl; Billy and Delle have their scripts and song lyrics—the only thing that seems to satisfy them at all.

DS:
I read somewhere that you feel your fiction is getting more, rather than less, autobiographical, and yet I do notice a significant autobiographical detail in this novel. So let’s talk birds, for just a second. Faith is an avid birder. She can even do that trick of getting a black-capped chickadee to land on her finger. I’ve seen your house. I’ve seen the bird feeders outside and all those ornithology books inside. So, first, a personal question. Can you do that chickadee trick?

MW:
Yes.

DS:
You can?

MW:
I do it exactly the way I describe it in the book. The first time I did it I was in the woods in New Hampshire, on a beautiful fall day. This chickadee—well, they’re fairly tame anyway, not that you can reach up and pluck them off a branch or anything—this chickadee perched just over my head and
I thought: “He’s tame.” I put up my hand and he landed briefly. I silently thanked the woman—I was sure it was a woman—who had tamed this guy at her feeder in Maine or Massachusetts or Quebec, who knows where.

DS:
A simple read of the birds in your book would be that they demonstrate Faith’s ability to love. She’s sufficiently damaged by her parents that she can’t articulate her emotions very well, even when Joe, her husband, needs her so desperately to
say
what she feels. But what else do you think Faith’s birding reveals about her?

MW:
Well, for her, I think all the birding—and the flowers that she tends and her house—exhibits her natural instinct for connection that has been blunted by other circumstances in her life. I don’t want to get too heavily symbolic with the birds. They arrived in the book because I love birds. And they stayed in there because I wanted to give this poor woman something to animate her. After all, she’s a tough character in a lot of ways.

DS:
Three of your characters—Billy, Delle, and Isadora—are all performers. They are also narcissistic, rather manipulative people. Do they strike you as incapable of love?

MW:
I think Billy and Delle really are. They’re in love with the idea of themselves like … I hate to say it … a lot of people in that profession. They’re also in love with the idea of themselves with two perfectly beautiful children. But I do have affection for them. They’re talented. They’re emotionally outsized. There’s something perversely attractive about them. Isadora is a whole other problem, though. She’s willing, she’s capable, but she is also … to say self-involved would be putting it mildly. But she’s not
just
a user. Her motivations are more complicated than that. There’s something really appealing to her about having instant sisters.

DS:
You’re a singer yourself. Can you say a little about your performing experience? Is there a reason you never pursued a career more seriously?

MW:
Well, let me tell you something … singing in bars at night gets old really fast. You’re breathing smoke all night long. You’re lugging equipment around. I did it for a few years. Now I don’t really do much performing to speak of.

DS:
For eight years, you were a high school guidance counselor. For me, some of your novel’s most affecting material concerns the years when Faith and Connie are in high school, surviving as virtual orphans. I wonder if the characters of Faith and Connie were drawn from something you came to understand about adolescents when you were still working at Westbrook High School.

MW:
I was still at Westbrook when I started the early versions of this book. Or it was right after I left. It’s hard to remember how a book starts. One thing about being a high school guidance counselor is you see every kind of kid there is, and you see kids in groups, which is different from interacting with your own kid and your own kid’s friends. You learn different things about kids’ hungers and fears. I did have kids who seemed to have been born forty, like Faith. They broke my heart, but I admired them deeply. They were able to somehow manage in the most gruesome situations.

DS:
Could you tell me a bit about the storytelling tradition in your own family?

MW:
I learned early on that if you were going to tell a story, you had to do it in a certain way. It had to be suspenseful or funny or compelling or flat-out eye-popping or nobody would bother repeating it. When someone starts to tell a big story in my family, we all sigh, “Oh, here goes Mrs. McCarn,” referring to one of the many Prince Edward Island eccentrics we grew up hearing about. Apparently this woman couldn’t tell a story without grabbing a coat off a rack or a pan off the stove, roaming the room to act out all the parts. We make fun of this storytelling method, but we all do it. My mother was the champion, but my sister Cathe and brother Barry are right on her heels. They can tell a hell of a story.

DS:
One thing I admire about your novel is how you handle time. Both how you move forward in time, and how you make time itself (memory and the past) part of your story. When I finished your novel, I thought of the optimistic Grace Paley quote about how characters should be allowed “the open destiny of life.” I have a rather happy sense of what may happen next to your characters, though I realize there are questions left up in the air. Certainly your novel feels done, and yet I wouldn’t mind re-meeting these characters in another novel or story. Have you ever felt tempted to go back to them? Or indeed to return to any of the characters in your finished work?

MW:
Never. Never. By the time I finish with a novel, I have spent so much time with these people that I love them dearly, but I never want to see them again.

DS:
Your own formal education in writing was relatively brief—you attended a month’s worth of writing workshops with George Garrett—and yet you yourself are a rather famous writing teacher in Maine. Your students speak of you with great affection and admiration, and you’ve written several books about writing. How does teaching writing influence your own writing?

MW:
I love to teach writing, because it keeps me in mind of the fundamentals and reminds me what I know—and don’t know—about craft. Just this morning I was struggling with a scene in a new novel, not getting what the
scene was about, but stubbornly writing and writing, all this lyrical folderol. Then I asked myself how I’d advise a student in my situation. I ended up doing one of my favorite exercises: rewriting a scene using words of only one syllable. Once I dispensed with the fancy stuff, I got to the heart of something that had been bugging me for weeks. Teaching prevents me from getting overconfident about my abilities just because I’m experienced. Probably the opposite is true: The more experience you have the less you can rely on your past tricks.